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What Can I Say? Default Skills Overview

In a nutshell

A "skill" is an add-on that teaches your assistant to do one thing: tell the weather, set an alarm, play the radio, answer trivia. This page is an index of ready-made skills you can add to OVOS, grouped by what they're for, each linking to a subpage with real example phrases and install steps. Some come pre-loaded depending on how you set OVOS up, others you add yourself. See Your First Skill if you want to build your own, or the Glossary for terms.

A non-exhaustive list of skills available for OpenVoiceOS. Whether a given skill is already on your assistant depends on how you installed it. See the legend below.

Each skill shows a Maturity rating from its repository health. See the Maturity Scale.

How to get a skill

Many of these ship with the ovos-installer's skill selection. To add one yourself, install its package (the repo link and install command are in the collapsed "Install" block under each skill on its subpage) and restart ovos-core. It scans for installed skills automatically. On RaspOVOS, prefer ovos-install <package>, RaspOVOS's own helper, which installs with the correct version constraints. On any other setup, pip install <package> works the same way. If a skill isn't published to PyPI, install straight from git, e.g. pip install git+https://github.com/OpenVoiceOS/ovos-skill-weather. To build your own, follow Your First Skill.

Availability legend:

  • Installer default: installed automatically when the ovos-installer's skills feature is on (the default).
  • Installer optional: installed only if you also enable the installer's extra-skills feature.
  • Manual install only: not offered by the installer at all. Add it yourself with ovos-install (on RaspOVOS) or pip install (otherwise).

Alerts & Time

Skill What it does
Alerts Alarms, timers, reminders, events, todos, with optional CalDAV sync.
Date & Time Current time, date, and calendar-day facts.
Naptime Puts the assistant to sleep until you say "wake up".

Weather

Installer default

Get weather conditions, forecasts, expected precipitation and more! You can also ask for other cities around the world. Current conditions and weather forecasts come from OpenMeteo.

Usage examples:

  • What's the temperature in Paris tomorrow in Celsius?
  • When will it rain next?
  • What's the high temperature tomorrow
  • Is it going to snow in Baltimore?

  • what is the weather like?

  • How windy is it?

  • What is the weather this weekend?
  • What is the weather in Houston?
  • Will it be cold on Tuesday
  • What's the temperature?
Install

OpenVoiceOS/ovos-skill-weather · pip install ovos-skill-weather · Maturity: Mature

Smart Home

Controlling actual smart-home devices (lights, plugs, thermostats, scenes) isn't built into OVOS itself. It is a separate skill that talks to Home Assistant. See OVOS & Home Assistant for the full setup story in both directions (OVOS controlling HA devices, and HA using OVOS's own speech engines), including install steps and usage examples.

Music & Radio

Skill What it does
PyRadios Plays stations from the Radio Browser API directory.
SomaFM Plays commercial-free internet radio from SomaFM.
News Plays news streams from around the globe.
Local Media Browses and plays audio/video files from a USB drive or local folder.

Fun & Trivia

Skill What it does
Dad Jokes Tells dad jokes.
Parrot Repeats back whatever you say.
Confucius Quotes Quotes from Confucius.
Today in History Historical events for any calendar day.
Number Facts Trivia facts about numbers.
Movie Master Movie, actor, and production info.
ISS Location Tracks the International Space Station.
DuckDuckGo Answers questions via DuckDuckGo.
Wikipedia Answers questions via Wikipedia.
WikiHow How-to instructions for nearly everything.
Wolfie (Wolfram Alpha) General-knowledge and math questions.
Wordnet Dictionary-like word lookups.
Spelling Spells words and phrases aloud.
Personal The assistant talks about its own "birth" and community.
Hello World Example skill for skill authors to study.

Utilities

Skill What it does
Volume Controls OVOS volume by voice.
IP Address Reports network connection info.
Speedtest Runs an internet bandwidth test.
Boot Finished Announces when OVOS has fully started.
Dictation Transcribes speech to a text file.
Audio Recording Records and manages audio clips.
Commands Runs shell scripts and system commands by voice.

Read next: Skill Development Overview Related: Fun stuff to try · Your First Skill · It's not behaving · Skill Dev F.A.Q.